Read the first pages free
I was an atheist for more than twenty years. I served as a Marine Scout Sniper, and today I'm a family medicine physician, a DO, with master's degrees in biology and business. I came back to Christ around 2024 and was baptized in April 2026. Then I read the Torah slowly, the way I was trained to read terrain and take a history. I wrote down the questions instead of rushing to the answers. This book is those questions. It's not a commentary, and I'm not a theologian. It's a companion to sit next to your Bible.
Introduction
This book is a companion, not a classroom, and not a church.
It’s meant to sit next to your Bible while you read, and preferably while you walk with a pastor and a local body of believers. It is especially for a layman, a first-time reader, or someone coming back after a long time away. It’s also for the skeptic and the nonbeliever. I spent more than twenty years on that side of the page, so if that’s where you are, you’re welcome here. Bring your questions. You get another person’s honest first-read perspective: deeper questions to ask, friction points that should show up, and the places where my habits as a Marine Scout Sniper, a physician, and a biologist snagged on the text. You do not get a scholarly commentary. I’m not qualified to offer that, and I’m not pretending to.
How to read this companion: additive knowledge
This guide is additive: it builds book by book and does not look ahead.
Start with a clean slate. Read Genesis. Build that knowledge. Then read Exodus, and you may circle back to Genesis with what Exodus just added. Then Leviticus, carrying Genesis and Exodus with you. Then Numbers. Then Deuteronomy. Each book stacks onto the last. The depth comes from accumulating what you have already met, not from skipping ahead to how the story later resolves.
Chapter 1: Genesis
Beginning, cosmos, and evolution
Genesis opens with God creating the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).
My first read
The idea of a beginning feels more like agreement than a fight.
Where I feel friction is evolution. To be precise about my snag: I’m less hung up on small-scale change we can observe (what people often call microevolution). The harder tension for me is the bigger origin-of-humankind story: common descent, deep time biology, and especially whether an unguided process can sit cleanly next to a God who personally forms and addresses human beings. I have not finished sorting which piece of that package is doing most of the work in my gut. I’m naming the friction, not crowning a model.
I’m a physician with a biology background. That tension shows up when I read. What I hold is this: if God made everything, He made science and our ability to think too. I don’t expect the root of reality to be contradictory. I expect I’m still early in understanding how the pieces fit. So I’m not handing you a final answer. I’m inviting you to sit with your own questions without forcing a fake peace treaty.
Questions
When Genesis says “in the beginning,” what do you assume that beginning is, and why?
Where do you feel agreement between a scientific picture of origins and this text? Where does it rub?
★ What would it look like to study Genesis without forcing science and Scripture to agree too early?
End of sample. The full book has thirty-eight Genesis questions plus Exodus through Deuteronomy.